Maxwell Pingeon
Major Russian Novels
Val Vinokurov
In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the characters of Levin and Anna are devoured by their doubts and their inability to derive meaning from their lives. Their means of dealing with this existential doubt differ, however. Where Anna sees her life as a novel, a structured series of events that has form and in which she is in the hands of fate, Levin grapples with his inability to find any form at all to the disordered, and seemingly meaningless nature of his life which he nevertheless lives in a determined and resolute fashion. Tolstoy implies through Levin, that though we would like to attribute the qualities we ascribe to Art to our own lives, because they are comforting and fanciful, they are inappropriate and misleading (see Morson). However much the mentalities of these two characters differ, they resemble each other in their resolute truthfulness. As the protagonists of the book, their approaches in dealing with their fate are juxtaposed in their final inner monologues, the contrasting of which is the intent of this essay. Tolstoy illustrates, through the destructive nature of Anna’s act, and the exaltation experienced by Levin at his epiphany, the danger of ascribing poetic importance to one’s own life. Conceiving of one’s own life, as one looks at a narrative, fated by omens and external forces, is not only narcissistic and selfish but untrue, whereas taking control of one’s life to do good is noble and meaningful.
Anna’s (and most young people’s) ideology of life is that it is only truly lived when it is most intense. Tolstoy disagrees with this and confronts it with the idea that, in the words of Gary Morson, “life is lived in the small and ordinary moments.” It is both “prosaic and undramatic” (Morson p. 73) at the same time. This is clear from the descriptions of daily life on the farm, and the almost holy significance Tolstoy ascribes to the mundane rituals necessary to cultivating the earth. But naturally, as the opening lines of the novel suggest, without Anna there would be no story; as she reminds herself on the train: “Happy people have no history.”
Anna gives up her previous life out of passion for Vronsky. Their love, magnified by her delusion, is strong enough to defeat scandal, and will abide her exclusion from society. This turns out to be disastrously untrue. Vronsky’s passion inevitably cools towards her and she must make a constant effort to keep it alive through her beauty and his attraction to it. The “moment” therefore passes and she is left to sort out the broken pieces of her life while maintaining a semblance of poise. In giving up her life, however sincere her love may be, she is following her own ideology in doing what seems truthful to her in the present moment. She is as resolute and determined as Levin in this respect and the reader sometimes wonders if they would have not have not made a good couple. “Besides intelligence, grace, beauty, there was truthfulness in her!” (p.700) Her choice is irrational and yet she believes that to act in any other way is untruthful and he admires her for that. She is convinced that external forces will arrange the future such is her conviction in the rightful passion of the ‘moment’. The beauty of Tolstoy’s creation is that although he does not agree with her, the reader sympathizes with her, looking at her situation from her perspective. “But it wasn’t my fault. And whose fault was it? What does “fault” mean? Could it have been otherwise? Could you not be Stiva’s wife?” (p. 635) The idea that one’s life could be any other way than how it is in the present moment is foreign to her. In the pit of his despair, Vronsky’s methodical rigor succumbs to this fatalism. The moment that they decide to be together, with or without the consent of Alexei, regardless of the consequences, their fate is sealed. “It will all pass, it will all pass; we shall soon be happy. Our love, if it could be stronger, will be strengthened because there is something terrible in it.” (p. 435) The “terrible” nature of their affair, the forbidden fruit, provides an impetus of thrill and desire, which inevitably cools. Vronsky and Anna could have done things “comme il faut”, by getting the divorce. But because of this fatalism, they bind themselves to the uncomfortable social abnormality that will make them both suffer.
